The Kunsthaus Dresden and its partners in Wrocław, Malmö and Dresden are delighted to open the exhibition and event series Vot ken you mach? dedicated to Jewish identities in present-day Europe. The Jewish-Russian composer Aaron Lebedeff posed this question in New York in the 1920s. In the project named after his song, a large variety of artistic answers are given almost one hundred years later. At the time, the song written in Anglicized Yiddish gave a linguistic form to the observation that identities are in a state of flux between different descents, the past and the future, thus corresponding with our present-day notion of identity as a constellation of potentialities. Vot ken you mach? presents works in diverse media by young contemporary artists in Europe on the history and present of Jewish identity. The artists of the show examine historical constellations of lively experience and identity, constructing conditions that enable treating individuality and history in an open way. What they have in common in the third generation after the Shoah is their concern to depart from established patterns between inhibition, compensation and trauma and by means of formal artistic decisions and the reflection on images. point ways to future forms of identity Vot ken you mach? Concerts, films, talks, performances and further exhibitions offer insights into questions related to art and (Jewish) identity: The thematic focuses include strategies of identity shifts in pop culture, new scenes of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe, family secrets and the silence between generations, remembrance as obligation, the unwritten cultural history of Jewish revenge and the search for a ‘normal’ Jewish everyday life.

In co-operation with the MWW - Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław, the Jewish Community in Dresden and
the Malmö Konstmuseum

Konzert: Ofrin

Ofri’s music style is an authentic, minimalistic, melodic avant-guard pop. Communicative and warm, moving between nostalgia to fresh up-to-date vibes, based on unique vocal arrangements and rhythmical, tribal and electronic elements. Ofri manages to create originality that some how feels familiar.

Yael Bartana’s Entartete Kunst Lebt (Degenerate Art Lives) alludes a painting of the German Expressionist Otto Dix (1891-1969) and is connected to the art history of Dresden, that is currently discussed in connection to the sensational recovery of the Gurlitt Collection: Kriegskrüppel (War Cripples, 1920) . In 1933, the painting was included in the propaganda exhibition organized by the Nazis under the title Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in Dresden. Like many of Dix’s works, it was probably destroyed during the Nazi regime. Bartana introduces the possibility of reconstructing Dix’s painting and its reinstatement to the ‘real world.’ This act of restoring the vanished past into the present by means of new technology and an animated film offers a new reading of the original work and its meaning in the past and in the present. Bartana thus explores the reference of one artist to the work of another, and the meaning of preserving and reconstructing a destroyed visual object by advanced technological means. Her work breathes ‘new life’ into the grotesque figures of Dix, through which the latter criticizes post-WWI Germany. This act of creation ‘ex nihilo’ sets the figures in motion, infusing them with false power which they did not originally possess, enabling them to keep moving. In Bartana’s work, as indicated by its title, Dix’s war cripples proudly carry and even physically produce live degenerate art. In their lives (and not by their deaths in war) − beaten, wounded, and exhausted − they declare their victory and the power of art. Israel 2010, 16mm loop, b&w, sound, 5 minutes. (http://www.arsenal-berlin.de)

Unfolding in a secluded Polish village by the woods and a river “Z daleka widok jest piękny” (It looks pretty from a distance) is a love story between a scrapper and a girl. In an air of ubiquitous secrecy the villagers and the couple live their usual dull lives of hardship until the scrapper vanishes. His disappearance triggers a chain of unexpected events. In the strikingly beautiful surroundings, under the schorching sun human evil surfaces.

Talk

Place: Jüdische Gemeinde

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 17 Uhr

Normal Jüdisch?

What does it mean to be Jewish in Germany today? Is there a ´normal` jewish everyday-life? To which part does the fact of being jewish make a difference in the families and in their everyday-life? These are some of the questions that will be discussed in our Cluster “Normal Jewish?”.

Exhibition

Place: Jüdische Gemeinde

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 17 Uhr

DRESDEN 5774

With Dresden 5774, the Jewish Community opens an exhibition dedicated to the cartoon stories of the Berlin-based cartoonist Elke R. Steiner, which she created specifically for Vot ken you mach?. Four Dresden residents born in the former Soviet union tell their stories. The comic strips give a vivid account of the various personalities of different generations, in which beyond the question of Jewishness a whole array of factors play a role: the areas of research of a philologist, a musician’s coping with stage fright, and other everyday observations of life in Dresden. Elke R. Steiner developed and condensed the comics from the accounts related by her discussion partners. Although these are abridged stories, they open up wide windows of perception and bring to bear the peculiarities in the lives of the persons she talked with, their knowledge and what is special about the commitment in their jobs and their attitude toward life. Her characters bear the real or new first names. Her stories touch Jewish identity in the way she encounters it in her life.

Elke R. Steiner is a cartoonist who since her story published under the title Rendsburg Prinzessinstrasse – Die Geschichte einer jüdischen Kleinstadtgemeinde has specialized in Jewish history. In 1999/2000 a grant from the Jüdische Museum Rendsburg and the Dr. Bamberger-Haus gave her the opportunity to work at their guest studio on a comic dealing with local Jewish history—the result, published by Edition Panel in 2001, impressively describes the normality of German-Jewish life over a longer period of time in a small town like Rendsburg. Further publications by Elke R. Steiner include Der Busfahrer, der Gott sein wollte after short stories by Etgar Keret in the ‘Jüdische Allgemeine Wochenzeitung’. The ‘Deutsche Ärzteblatt’ published Doc und Doctrix as well as the much-discussed, episodic biographies of two Jewish physicians in Germany, Herbert Lewin and Käte Frankenthal. New short stories by Elke R. Steiner are also regularly published by the Bremen-based comic magazine ‘Panel.’

Since the publication of the first volume in 2004, her second major story, Die anderen Mendelssohns, has been dealing with the “black sheep” of the famous family, elucidating individual lines of the genealogical tree based the six children of Moses Mendelssohn: Dorothea von Schlegel (1764-1839), née Mendelssohn, divorced Veit – second generation; Arnold Mendelssohn (1817-1854) – third generation; Carl Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1838-1897) – fourth generation; Eleonora (1900-1951) and Francesco (1901-1972) von Mendelssohn – sixth generation. The first volume, Die anderen Mendelssohns – Dorothea Schlegel, Arnold Mendelssohn, was published in cooperation with the Jüdische Kulturtage and the Jüdische Volkshochschule in Berlin by Reprodukt-Verlag.

Elke R. Steiner lives and works in Berlin as a cartoonist and illustrator.

Film

Place: Jüdische Gemeinde

Thu, 1. Jan 1970

Film: Jew.De.Ru.

‘Jew.de.ru – The Jewish Contingent Refugees’ is a documentary film that tells the story of young Jews who immigrated to Germany as children from the former Soviet Union. The film takes the audience on a journey through the lives of Lena, Swetlana and Ilia, who had to overcome many challenges in a new country, before they learned how to combine three cultures into their lives. The film also talks about the difference between Jewish life in the former Soviet Union and life as a Jewish person in today’s Germany and explains why Jewish families immigrated to Germany forty six years after the end of the Holocaust. (www.imdb.com)

Exhibition

Place: Kunstfoyer, Kulturrathaus

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 19 Uhr

Luftmenschen - Between Algiers and Odessa, underway in the picture worlds of the French cartoonist Joann Sfar

An exhibition by Kunsthaus Dresden in cooperation with the Institut français in Dresden and the Kulturamt der Landeshauptstadt Dresden in the frame of the project Vot ken you mach? with works by the famous French cartoonist Joann Sfar.

“It is not my task to show things the way they are,” says one of the protagonists in Joann Sfar’s comic The Rabbi’s Cat and thus puts the artistic concept of the French cartoonist, author and director in a nutshell. Sfar finds it more important to capture the magic of a period, a city or a culture than to illustrate historical facts in detail—yet in his breathtakingly contemporary works, he succeeds in conveying to the readers deep insights into Jewish life-worlds between the Eastern European shtetl and the North African desert.

He has been influenced by the image worlds of Marc Chagall, and so it comes as no surprise that Joann Sfar’s work is inhabited by flying people, Jews who counter their repeated, violent, historical uprooting with a positive model and literally free themselves from all constraints. The metaphor of the “Luftmensch [air person]” that Sfar takes up in his pictures originated in the 19th century and has a number of meanings: from the self-description of a precarious economic situation to the anti-Semitic accusation of rootlessness forming the catchphrase of the anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish campaign initiated by Stalin and lasting from 1948 to 1953 (Wurzellose Kosmopoliten (Rootless Cosmopolitans)). In the image of rootlessness, there also lies—beyond despair—the hope that conditions will change, that persecution and expulsion can be eluded through a miracle or by chance. The state of hovering, of not being rooted, bears the potential of independence from religious and social constraints and the, at least narrative, salvation of Jewish life-worlds destroyed by German National Socialism in transferring them to comics.

Joann Sfar, who was born in Nice in 1971, studied philosophy and then art. In just a few years, he has created an expansive oeuvre characterized by the intensive delving into historical Jewish lifestyles in Eastern Europe and their consequent hybrid mingling with a present-day version of Jewish identities and—something which is perhaps most important—a utopian space of potentials of what an identity not bound to territories could be: “Luftmenschen” in the best sense!

Sfar’s cartoons are populated by golems, dybbuks and other traditional Jewish figures. In addition to Jewish artists such as Chagall or Pascin, he has dealt with Eastern European Judaism in Klezmer and North African Judaism in The Rabbi’s Cat. These two perspectives also shape Sfar’s biography: one half of his family is from today’s Ukraine, the other has a North African background.

It was above all the cartoon story The Rabbi’s Cat about a speaking cat arguing with a rabbi over religious and philosophical questions that established his reputation as one of the most innovative and exciting French cartoonists of his generation—and one of the most successful: His volumes have been sold far more than a million times in France and the movie adaptation realized by Sfar also attracted a large audience. Joann Sfar’s work, which traverses all genres and styles, is yet to be discovered in Germany: be it fantastical literature or philosophy, historical comics or surreal worlds, cartoons for children or vampire stories, watercolor shades or austere black and white, quickly drawn sheets or portraits rich in detail – there’s hardly anything that Sfar doesn’t master.

The exhibition was conceived by Jonas Engelmann and Christoph Rodde:

Jonas Engelmann wrote the dissertation ‘Gerahmter Diskurs. Gesellschaftsbilder im Independent-Comic’ (Ventil Verlag 2013) and been organizing the Jewish culture festival ‘Hip im Exil. Facetten des Judentums’ in Mainz since 2012. In his book ‘Gerahmter Diskurs,’Jonas Engelmann gives an introduction to the origin, the aesthetics and the theory of independent cartoon production, shedding light on avant-garde cartoon experiments in South Africa and France and on the history of Jewish comics. Christoph Rodde is an artist and initiator of numerous artistic projects in Dresden. His intensive dealing with the medium of drawing has led to a number of exhibitions in Dresden.

The exhibition was realized with the kind support of Johann Ulrich of the AVANT – Verlag.

In the frame of Vot ken you mach, Jonas Engelmann, a freelance writer and comics specialist in Wiesbaden, has compiled an exhibition titled Wurzellose Kosmopoliten. Comics zu jüdischen Identitäten in Europa, USA und Israel (Rootless Cosmopolitans. Comics on Jewish Identities in Europe, the United States and Israel) on view from January 22 in the foyer of Kunsthaus Dresden .

The lounge contains thirty volumes of various authors from Europe, the United States and Israel and was designed in collaboration with WILDSMILE Studios Dresden.

The comic legend Will Eisner once remarked in a speech that he became a cartoonist because Jewish immigrants in America in the first decades of the 20th century had only few possibilities to work in other artistic fields.

And indeed, like hardly any other medium, comics in America were strongly shaped from the very start by Jewish immigrants who had settled on the East Coast. Already in the comics of early artists such as Milt Gross, one can find reflections on the immigrant situation of the Jewish population and their attempt to integrate themselves in American society.

Aspects of this early connection between Jewish identity in the New World and the medium of comics can also be found today. The comics exhibition Wurzellose Kosmopoliten. Comics zu jüdischen Identitäten in Europa, USA und Israel (Rootless Cosmopolitans. Comics on Jewish Identities in Europe, the United States and Israel) curated by Jonas Engelmann shows this relationship based on works dealing with Jewish (migration) traces in America: Graphic novels by artists such as Leela Corman, James Sturm or Will Eisner visualize Jewish life torn between memories of the Eastern European shtetl and the reality of the New World. Especially the works of Will Eisner set in New York highlight the living conditions of migrants in the first half of the 20th century from a Jewish perspective. A few decades later, Ben Katchor, in The Jew of New York, portrays a fictive Jewish New York in the 19th century.

Characters and themes of Jewish cultural history have also experienced a renaissance in comics in the past twenty years, a reference to Jewish traditions in the shadow of Auschwitz. A second focus of the exhibition is on Jewish life in Europe prior to 1933. Be it Jewish mysticism in Dino Battaglia’sGolem, Jewish cultural history in David Zane Mairowitz’ and Robert Crumb’sKafka or everyday life in Eastern Europe in James Sturm’sMarkttag and Sammy Harkham’sEverything Together: The view to the past before the Shoah has increasingly become a theme in comics over the past years.

Film

Place: Technische Sammlungen

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 20 Uhr

Film: Die Katze des Rabbiners

The Rabbi’s Cat is a 2011 French animated film directed by Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux, based on volume one, two and five of Sfar’s comics series with the same title. It tells the story of a cat which obtains the ability to speak after swallowing a parrot, and its owner who is a rabbi in 1920s Algeria. English subtitling

A Jewish turtle and a contemporary Faust are testing themselves. Faust is on a mission, to merely understand the most complex question of all; what is Judaism? one night to study over 3000 years of history and culture. The Jewish turtle is skeptic. She is not interested, she knows all the answers. She is convinced that only a real Jew can understand what it is actually means to be one. The turtle policy is: defensive but not offensive. We are ready for everything. The artistic team SuperYoutour is running an experiment. One night, lots of questions. From the 3rd till the 4th of February SuperYoutuor will spend the night in the “Kunsthaus Dresden”. Audience will be able to participate in the 14 h experiment exclusively online.

Start: 03.02.2014 8 pm

End : 04.02.2014 10 am

Film

Place: Technische Sammlungen

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 20 Uhr

Film: Die Wohnung

The Flat is a 2011 Israeli feature documentary film written and directed by Arnon Goldfinger. It was theatrically released in Israel in September 2011. It played continuously for thirteen months and has received good reviews. Tel Aviv chose to place the film at the top of its recommended films for 49 weeks under the headline: “not to be missed” and chose it as one of the 25 most important art works from around the world for 2011. The Flat was theatrically released in Germany in June 2012. The German version of the film features the voice of renowned German actor Axel Milberg taking on the role of narrator Arnon Goldfinger. ‘The Flat’ was theatrically released in USA in October 2012. The film won the 2012 Best Editing in a Documentary Feature Award in the Tribeca Film Festival World Documentary Competition. It was the opening film at Dok Munich in 2012. 97 min, 2011, Israel /Germany. OmU

Film: Oma und Bella

Oma and Bella is an intimate portrait of two elderly Jewish women in Berlin with humor, powerful stories, and a deep fondness for good food. As the documentary follows them through their daily lives, a portrait emerges of two Holocaust survivors who stayed in Germany. They answer questions of heritage, memory and identity, ultimately, through the re-creation of the sumptuous foods from their childhood. This film, made by Oma’s granddaughter, follows them as they struggle to retain a part of their past while being very much engaged in the present.

Film

Place: Technische Sammlungen

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 20 Uhr

Film: Das verrückte Liebesleben des Simon Eskenazy

86 min, 2008, France

Talk

Place: Scheune

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 20:30 Uhr

Lost & Found again in Ost - Eine Spurensuche zwischen Subkultur und Judentum in Osteuropa

Konzert: Daktari (Impro Post Punk meets Jazz’n’Jewishness)

Daktari is a Polish group led by trumpeter Olgierd Dokalski. Their music is an organic fusion of noise, jazz improvisations and folk songs. It is framed in an avant-garde structure, leaving the musicians a lot of freedom. Among the band’s inspirations one can find Mogwai, Sonic Youth, Gastr Del Sol, Andrew Hill, Julius Hemphill and Don Cherry.

The group members have various musical backgrounds: from jazz, electronic music to post-rock and punk.

Daktari was founded in 2010 in Warsaw and very quickly draw attention of critics and promoters. Even before releasing they debut album, they played at New Tradition Festival of the Polish Radio, New Jewish Music Festival and on the World Stage of Heineken Opener (best major festival in Europe in 2009). They also played at Warsaw Summer Jazz Days and Tzadik Festival in Poznań.

Their debut album „This is the last song I wrote about Jews. Vol 1.” was released in August 2011 by Multikulti – very prestigious label known for releasing most interesting albums from Polish jazz and improvisation scene. This CD is both highly acclaimed by the critics and by the audience and is present on several radio broadcasts (one can hear their music in Polish Radio Program 2, PIN Radio, TOK FM, Radio Kampus, Radio Jazz, Roxy FM). Their debut record appeared on few lists of the best Polish albums of year 2011 (Porcys.pl, Tegoslucham.pl and Uwolnijmuzyke.pl). In October 2011, DAKTARI had been chosen to represent Polish folk music on the biggest world music fair: WOMEX EXPO 2011 in Copenhagen, Denmark. Their composition “Pollux” appeared on the compilations “Rootz from Polska” and „MuLaKuŻ – New Jewish Music out of Poland 2009 – 2011”.

Their 2013 second release, “I Travel Within My Dreams With a German Passport”, recorded for Circon Int. label in Berlin on a session that took place shortly after their performance at Berliner JazzFest was reviewed in polish press and blogosphere as even better than the debut. In 2014 thir third album “Lost Tawns”is due to release on Multikulti.

Konzert: Daniel Kahn

Daniel Kahn, born and raised in Detroit, is a singer, musician, actor, director, composer, and story-teller, and founder of the band Daniel Kahn & The Painted Birds. After studying theater studies and music, he lived and worked in New Orleans, Detroit, New York, and Ann Arbor, making a name for himself as a nightclub pianist, at bluegrass jams and punk circus parades, as well as with directing and acting. Kahn today lives and works in Berlin.

In Daniel Kahn’s universe one can find references to the American folk tradition, to Klezmer, Yiddish workers’ songs, the German Romantic period, Brecht/Weill, and on and on… One of the centers of this diverse network is his dealing with Jewish identity, characterized by catchwords such as the ongoing memory of the Holocaust, Zionism and post-Zionism, Diaspora, and exile. But the great advantage of Kahn’s songs is that they are fun to listen to.

Concert

Place: Scheune

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 21 Uhr

Konzert: Kabbalah

Kabbalah is a band from Marseille with musicians from the most various musical and cultural backgrounds. The different styles that they bring along are combined by the musicians from Saint Petersburg, Cameroon, Berlin, New York, and Cracow to a unique mixture which Stef Galewski has termed ‘Yiddish Dada’.

The songs usually have Yiddish lyrics, but there are also Russian, English and German ones, resulting in, as the band calls it: ‘Slam rock, Yid pop, a golem on Congo Square and maybe also Bikutsi punk.’

Film: Hannah Arendt

When Hannah Arendt (Barbara Sukowa) enters the courtroom in Jerusalem in 1961 to report on the trial against the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann for the renowned The New Yorker, she expects meeting a monster. Instead, she experiences a nobody. Eichmann’s vapid mediocrity doesn’t fit to the abysmal evil of his deeds. This contradiction is something that strongly preoccupies Hannah Arendt. Back in New York, she reads hundreds of records of the case, does research, discusses with her husband Heinrich Blüchler (Axel Milberg) and her friends. Starting in February 1963, her series of articles titled Eichmann in Jerusalem is published in The New Yorker. With her proposition of the ‘banality of evil’, Arendt shocks the world. The responses are devastating. Hannah Arendt is ostracized, met with hostility and loses lifelong friends. She is hit hard by the incomprehension of her friends, less by the smear campaigns launched by numerous media. Yet she consistently sticks to her stance, fighting and avoiding no disputes when themes such as totalitarianism and power that are so important to her are at issue. For she wants to understand, even if that means ‘thinking to where it hurts’.

Germany/France/Israel, 2013, 112 min.

Talk

Place: Kunsthaus

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 19 Uhr

Revenge

Tal Sterngast (artist and filmmaker, Berlin) and Manfred Hermes (freelance author, Berlin) talk about Jewish revenge after the Shoah based on film examples.

In Quentin Tarantino’s movie Inglourious Basterds (2009), a broad audience took pleasure in an imaginary revenge campaign against the perpetrators of the Shoah.

Since the beginning of artistic dealings with the ‘final solution,’ Jewish revenge has been present as a cinematographic topos, even if not in such an unambiguous manner as in Inglourious Basterds. When talk is of revenge after the Shoah, questions of law, justice, resistance, and retribution are also always raised. At the same time, the anti-Semitic myth of ‘old Testament revenge’ also arises. How have filmmakers treated this topic since the end of the Second World War? Can cinematographic images themselves unfold a moment of vengeance?

In their lectures, Tal Sterngast and Manfred Hermes elucidate facets of the topos of revenge based on examples from the TV series Twilight Zone and feature films by Artur Brauner, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Quentin Tarantino.

Exhibition

Place: S T O R E

Thu, 1. Jan 1970

Heimweh

Opening of the exhibition by the artist Michaela Melián: Heimweh in cooperation with the Dresdner exhibition space S T O R E run by Konstanze Schütze and Paul Barsch. Michaela Melián has previously presented an extensive artistic work dealing with the history of the displaced persons camp Föhrenwald near Munich and the people who lived there. Between 1946 and 1948 it was one of the largest DP camps in the American occupation zone with around 5,600 inhabitants. The piece was also on view on the grounds of the synagogue and was awarded one of the most important German radio play prizes.

Glass objects are arranged on a table, everyday things such as different tumblers, bowls, bulbs, vases, acrylic packages, CD covers etc., as well as prisms cut to geometrical bodies, such as cuboids, cylinders and pyramids, made specifically for the show. The objects are illuminated by a slide projector that turns them into an abstract urban landscape. A cut prism on a small motor rotates in front of the slide projector’s lens creating a kind of film along the walls of the room in which the projected city permanently changes in a flowing motion. At the same time, configurations of spectral colors alternate on the surface of the table between the glass objects.

The slides running through the rotating projector create a specific rhythm. Around two thirds of the slide frames are empty and function as a pure source of light illuminating the glass objects and the projection of the city. Between the empty frames are slides of greatly enlarged details of Else Lasker-Schüler’s drawings and texts. Her work is fed into the slowly rotating projection and fragmented and refracted by the glass objects.

The third element of the spatial installation is an audio track with a recording of Heimweh written by Else Lasker-Schüler in 1909 in Berlin. The poem is read in German and, in a phonetic adaptation, also in Hebrew and Arabic and is embedded in a composition produced from the sounds of a glass harmonium.

Installation with slide projection and audio track, 2012

Glasses, prisms, slides, projector, motor, audio track

Voice: Juno Meinecke

Hebrew coach: Noi Fuhrer

Translation into Arabic: Husein Chawich

Arabic coach: Safaa Nisani

Voice recordings: Michael Heilrath

Music: Michaela Melián

Historical and theoretical background of the slide and audio installation

Heimweh

For the title of the Hebräische Balladen (1912), Else Lasker-Schüler made a drawing of her artistic alter ego, Jussuf, Prince of Thebes, holding a miniature city in his arm. In iconographic respect, this depiction is reminiscent of those of patron saints of a city.

Her artistic figure Jussuf, a synthesis of Yussuf (12th surah of the Quran) and Joseph (Genesis), stands for being foreign in the sense of exile, but also for being foreign among one’s own people. The place of longing, Thebes, a mythical projection from the Oriental-biblical past, imagines the model of a future community.

In a life-long appropriation process, Lasker-Schüler reformulated found material in her texts and pictures. Through accentuations and collages, she dissolved the borders between the European and Oriental, Jewish and Arabic, one’s own and the other. Religions, spaces, times, genders, and ethnicities are transcended in the location of Thebes and the figure of Jussuf.

Lasker-Schüler dispenses with perspectival constructions in her pictures, she emphasizes contours and confines herself to what is essential. Basic geometrical shapes, square (palace) and circular arc (temple) are combined as modules to form the Oriental city of Thebes. She uses everyday materials, such as metal foils, forms, envelopes, postcards, and perforated, lines, squared and cut pages for collages. Even her drawings are cut and reassembled. Lasker-Schüler’s performative readings include sound effects and an invented language, which as ›mystical Asian‹ is meant to allude to Hebrew and Arabic.

Like many assimilated Jews in Germany, Else Lasker-Schüler constantly experiences that they are viewed by others, by non-Jews, as ‘totally un-German’ without ‘Germanic blood’, as not belonging. Against this anti-Semitic background, many Jewish intellectuals and artists begin looking to the Orient and romanticizing—like many of their non-Jewish colleagues as well—the supposed authenticity of Far eastern and African art and culture.

This attitude is embedded in the zeitgeist: In the wake of national colonial policies around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, objects of everyday use and cult objects are exhibited in ethnological museums and even people in the anthropological displays at fairs. Stereotype of exotic peoples are constructed in popular culture (cinema, cabaret, circus, costume festivals, popular literature).

After Lasker-Schüler had to leave Germany in 1933 and began living in Palestine from 1939 onward, she adheres to the orientalizing depiction of her figures, juxtaposing Arabs and Jews of different Oriental and European origin as ‘twin tribes’ that can be distinguished only by the way they dress.

She is interested in an ethically legitimized community that assumes ‘true international’ responsibility in a binational state.

Michaela Melián 2012

Film

Place: Kunsthaus

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 17 Uhr

Film: Ellis Island

The film Ellis Island (1981) by the filmmaker, choreographer and avant-garde musician Meredith Monk kicks off the event: Imaginary shtetl cultures on their path to oblivion in the United States and Europe, contemporary avant-garde film and folklore.

Talk

Place: Kunsthaus

Thu, 1. Jan 1970, 17:30 Uhr

Missing Links

Invited to Missing Links, a panel discussion on April 13 on art, museum work and the blank spots on the maps of our memory are: Jutta Fleckenstein (Jüdisches Museum München), Astrid Schmetterling (Goldsmiths College) and Marika Reuterswärd (Konstmuseum Malmö).

Prior to the discussion, a screening of Ellis Island (1981) by Meredith Monk and the first film by Chantal Akerman, Saut ma ville (1968).

The London-based art historian Astrid Schmetterling (Goldsmith College) will talk about the concepts of testimony, tradition and representation of memory in the present, referring, among others, to Marianne Hirsch’s concept of “postmemory” that describes the relationship of the children of survivors to the memories of the parent generation, and establishing connections to the screened films, the works of the exhibition VOT KEN YOU MACH? and the question of how art can be “re-membered.”

Jutta Fleckenstein is a historian and curator at the Jüdische Museum in Munich specialized in German-Jewish history and issues related to identity and migration. Based on her two-part exhibition project Juden 45/90, she will outline the challenge of addressing the time after the Shoah in a museum. The first part of the exhibition, ‘Von da und dort – Überlebende aus Osteuropa (From Here to There – Survivors from Eastern Europe)’ dealing with the immediate post-war period, featured a number of everyday objects exhibited for the first time as well as the voices of contemporary witnesses. The second part, ‘Von ganz weit weg – Einwanderer aus der ehemaligen Sowjetunion (From Far, Far Away – Immigrants from the Former Soviet Union),’ presented the Russian-Jewish-German present in the museum. The protagonists of migration from East to West after 1990 told their stories and opened up perspectives on the themes of memory, contemporary Jewishness and homeland.

Marika Reuterswärd, curator of the Konstmuseum Malmö, gives an account of the special history of the Konstmoseum Malmö, which starting in April 1945 served as a reception center of the Red Cross for Jewish men, women and children and provided temporary shelter for more than 2000 people, mostly from Poland. Her lecture includes a reflection on the venue’s special cultural obligation to a contemporary migration society, which is a result of this legacy.

The film Ellis Island (1981) by the filmmaker, choreographer and avant-garde musician Meredith Monk kicks off the event: Imaginary shtetl cultures on their path to oblivion in the United States and Europe, contemporary avant-garde film and folklore.

A further frame is the film Saut ma ville by the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman from 1968: A lonesome young woman in a high-rise on the outskirts of the city. She comes home. The elevator is out of order, she runs upstairs until she’s breathless. She cooks, polishes her shoes, makes a mess, cleans up. Finally, she tapes the door and window cracks and turns on the gas tap.